


Guilty pleasure

by barkspawnvevo



Series: Conquer the stars [2]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, some time before the end of me3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-21
Updated: 2015-05-21
Packaged: 2018-03-31 14:54:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3982219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/barkspawnvevo/pseuds/barkspawnvevo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kaidan wakes up in the middle of the night and sees Shepard next to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Guilty pleasure

**Author's Note:**

> Here's a very short story I wrote one night when I couldn't sleep. Hope you enjoy!

If he were to admit his favorite thing in the world, they would think him insane. It was waking up to his headaches almost every night. But they didn't know the truth, they didn't know why. He loved waking up around 4AM, because that was when she was still asleep. He would be awaken to an unendurable pain, but she was lying next to him, silent and calm, her chest slowly raising and lowering to the sound of her breath. And suddenly, even though the pain was still there, everything was better. He would tuck away the stray hairs fallen to her face, kiss her gently on the forehead and just be there for awhile until his headache went away - or atleast faded even a bit. It was his quilty pleasure, to watch her make little sounds, twitch in her sleep and so on. He knew that every time could be the last time he'd see it. The same time tomorrow she could be dead or he could be dead or they both could be. A bullet from a Cerberus gun could find it's target at a place where a barrier was weak, a falling ceiling could crush them or a floor could break under them while they were battling Reaper forces camped in high building.  
But every time she was clutching her pillow and mumbling in her sleep beside him, they were just a normal couple. Two people loving each other, kissing each other good night before they laid to sleep next to each other, holding hands under the table while their friends joked around them, sitting together on a couch watching a vid. During those moments, she wasn't the saviour of the galaxy, last hope and responsible for every living being across so many planets. She wasn't the vanguard of this war, the one person who had in her fingertips a power to bring entire races to the verge of an extinction but who still spared them out of mercy and because of her hope to unify the galaxy to fight an enemy so massive that no race could do it alone. But what made these moments so peaceful was that when she was asleep, he was able to relax too. When she was down there, wheter he was with her not, he was not able to keep her safe. Even if he was with field with her, in one blink of an eye she could go from shooting a husk to charging towards a massive Brute or Marauder. Not that he would've wanted her to be any different. She was a powerful biotic, and to use that only to fight from distance would've been both waste of her talents and for her the most frustrating thing in the world. But still he treasured those few hours when she slept and he could be completely sure she was safe and nothing could harm her. Some time ago he wouldn't even been sure of that. He had been a little twitchy about returning to Normandy, even though she would be there: the last time he had been aboard a Normandy, that one had gone down taking her from him for what seemed them like an eternity. However, the upgrades Shepard had completed with Cerberus resources had made the Normandy-SR2 the safest place to be during the time when every other place could be decimated by Reapers in any second.

Suddenly, she opened her eyes and gasped. She rose up to a sitting position and looked around until her eyes spotted him. "Kaidan?" she asked. "Why are you up? What's the time?". He took his hand on her shoulder with a worried look on his face. "It's okay, you still have time to sleep. Had a nightmare?" he said. She nodded and swallowed hard, sweat glimmering on her forehead. "Yeah. Could you.. hold me for awhile?" she asked, her voice drowsy and her eyes blinking with exhaustment. "Of course", he answered and made room for her when she pressed her back against his chest. It had always been like this when loving Shepard: she would be the stormwind, taking down everything in her way, calming only to gather strangth for a next attack destroying even more than the first one. Unless you were really lucky. And as he closed his arms around her and felt her relaxing in his embrace, he could've sworn he was the luckiest man in the world.


End file.
